Wednesday 16 July 2014 11.00 EDT
First published on Wednesday 16 July 2014 11.00 EDT

"Nikki is all to hell," the book opens, which is most definitely true. "Nikki has been 13 forever" apparently, and that is the trouble, as usual. Within a page we learn that her mother's boyfriend Wesley "wants to stick his dick in her", then Mama, jealous, falls off a cliff, catapulting Nikki from the unhappy certainties of life in a care home into the brutal uncertainties of something far worse. Opening in a present-day Appalachia populated by trailer-park paedophiles, drug fiends and pimps, the story continues with Wesley getting his way, before Nikki makes off with his car and bag of pills. From there she heads up the hill to her father's place, where she's greeted by her unfamiliar half-brother, Levi, and the unfortunately named Angel – a fellow refugee from a children's home. The subsequent reunion with her ex-con Dad, Coy Hawkins, illustrates a writing style as unshowy as it is unfeeling.

A page later Nikki notes that his eyes don't look as though he is smoking crack any more, but by the end of the scene he has snorted the stolen "roxies" and is flat out on the couch. Throughout a story blasted by violence, exploitation and the unrelenting bleakness of lives cannibalised by poverty and addiction, this knack for the loaded understatement serves Faw Morris well.

Slipping, uninvited, into life with her father and Angel, Nikki initially looks set for a slow, debased slide into oblivion. Her father's seemingly ambivalent attitude to her very existence, accompanied by Angel's open hostility, leave her isolated in a situation where allies are all. That is until, with a cunning and unlikely subtlety, Morris begins to grow odd strands of a more recognisable humanity up through her monstrous creations. Take, for example, the father who is happy to aggressively pimp out Angel, a girl his daughter's age, right in front of her: he is so wounded by her disappointment – now that he is no longer the "biggest coke dealer in the county" – that "All you do … is sit in parking lots all night" that he slashes the face of another pimp in order to prove himself.

And while the cursory reader could contend that the characters are cliched or the plotting melodramatic – people do get chopped up with axes, and no one screams – there are in fact several complex strands being forced to work together by her technical skill. There are themes of male cruelty towards vulnerable young girls, of the insidious nature of the dealer pragmatically sowing addiction in his own community, of the uninterested parent who can't quite slough off the last vestiges of parental feeling, of the child so neglected she no longer understands where the boundaries of the parent-child relationship lie, and the wresting back of power and personal autonomy in even the direst of circumstances. Certainly it is the accomplishment with which Faw Morris achieves these extraordinarily difficult juxtapositions that is one of the most interesting and admirable aspects of her strange, remarkable book. The cumulative result is a powerful portrait of humanity in the face of everyday atrocity.

In Young God Faw Morris has made a dark world but she shows it to us through an excess of white. Short paragraphs, empty pages, disconnected sentences printed alone add an expressionistic, almost filmic quality to the already stark narrative. It's a quick read but likely to leave even the sturdiest stunned because, as all good storytellers know, trusting the reader to fill in the gaps by themselves always leads to the most disconcerting conclusions of all.